smoke on the water

Today was lovely. Heiress stayed steady in the rankings all day, which was great because the ranking is good, but bad because I wasted a lot of time refreshing the Barnes and Noble page whenever I thought about it (which was probably more often than a dude thinks of sex), only to find that nothing had really changed. It's still #6 in Regency / #13 in Historical, which is epically satisfying, particularly since the only books ahead of it are either by super famous authors or are priced at <$1.99 (or both). I don't know how long this will last, and even at rankings that good I'm not selling enough copies to retire (retire from retirement? didn't know that was possible), but it's pretty awesome while it lasts.

Beyond that, I tried to stop obsessing long enough to write, and I managed to eke out eight pages, which I will totally take. I'm getting closer to the end, but this weekend needs to be massive. I went back to my tried and true tactic of writing longhand, which was even more useful today because it meant I couldn't just break my train of thought every three minutes to check Barnes and Noble. And rather than carrying around a giant, daunting notebook full of blank pages, I made a special notebook with ~15 pages in it so that I could feel like I was making obvious progress with every page I filled. The tactic was successful, and I wrote a scorcher of a scene, so yay for me. I also discovered my new favorite place to work -- it's called Readers Cafe, it's in Fort Mason, it serves Blue Bottle Coffee, and it's attached to (and the proceeds go to) the used bookstore run by the Friends of San Francisco Public Library. It's like it was made for me! And it wasn't crowded, given that it's in the middle of Fort Mason and not heavily advertised/obvious. And it was nice to walk down there and back and clear my head. And I was able to stop at Safeway on the way home and buy some shrimp, which I threw into a stirfry and devoured when I got home. So yay to all of that.

Boo to my social life, though, which is suffering as a result of my art (which sounds better than suffering as a result of my procrastination, which has thrown me into a crunch time)...it sounded like Priyanka wanted to hang out this afternoon and I couldn't, and I barely talked to Terry today even though she worked from home and was here all night. But hopefully I'll finish Malcolm/Amelia soon so that I never have to read them again and can focus on other things, like friends and Ellie/Nick and the gargoyles (remember the gargoyles? it would be awesome if I could ever finish them...). And now I shall go to bed, since I have to drive down to Palo Alto and train with Alyssa tomorrow before hitting the book hard in the afternoon. Goodnight!